Tool’s Maynard James Keenan Tried to Get Booked at Lilith Fair

What do Sarah McLachlan and Tool’s frontman Maynard James Keenan have in common? Strangely enough, the Lilith Fair festival, which McLachlan cofounded in 1997 as a way to celebrate female musicians.

Glamour magazine published a history of Lilith Fair today (July 5), which included a strange anecdote about Keenan, who once requested that his all-male band be added to the exclusively female-focused festival lineup.

According to the article, McLachlan said, “All of a sudden [the press was casting me as] the daughter for the new feminist revolution, and I’m either too femi­nist or not feminist enough, depending on who was firing the questions. And every day it was like, ‘Why do you hate men? Why don’t you have men on the bill?'”

Keenan then remarked, “I asked our booking agent to request an offer to play. He did. They declined. I wanted the ‘thank you but no thank you’ letter to frame. Never got it.”